


Three's Company

by perfectpro



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Pre-Poly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:46:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28635720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: “You want me to do what here, exactly? Just ask Damon to come upstairs with us so we can jump his bones?” Elena asks, the skepticism clear in her tone.Stefan gives it a moment to think it over. It sounds about as good of a plan as any.“Boys,” Elena sneers.AU after season 1. Nobody dies, nobody has to choose.
Relationships: Damon Salvatore/Stefan Salvatore, Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore, Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore/Stefan Salvatore, Elena Gilbert/Stefan Salvatore
Comments: 3
Kudos: 63





	Three's Company

**Author's Note:**

> I watched The Vampire Diaries for the first time a few months ago, and everyone who asks me whether I'm team Stefan or team Damon infuriates me. Why not both?
> 
> Also, there's no set timeline for when this takes place. I don't know, but it's how it should have gone.  
> Definitely AU post season one.

Elena knows so much about vampires, but he’s happy to answer any questions that she still has. He eats a whole clove of garlic to prove a point, even though it tastes disgusting while raw and she’s seen him eat garlic bread before. She knows about their speed, and every use for vervain they’ve been able to think of, and how their rings are what lets them walk in the sunlight. And she of course knows about their hearing, but he wonders if she’s ever thought about the implications that it has.

“Like that, yes,” she hisses through clenched teeth before letting out a wanton moan. 

It’s a brief lull in the chaos that surrounds them, before they even know who Isobel is, when everything is quiet and it seems like the world might be at peace. Their biggest concern is an upcoming history exam that Elena is relying on Stefan to teach her, since he lived through it. She’d actually come over under the guise of studying today, a pretense that had gone out the window as soon as they were in his room together.

Following her instructions, he keeps the same pace even though he wants to go a little faster, to let go. He doesn’t, though, because she’s human (so fragile, so breakable, so _tempting_ ), and he’s always careful with her. Even with his arousal building in the pit of his stomach, he does what she asks of him. “Like that?” he checks in, reaching between them to swipe a thumb across her clit.

She whimpers and moans again, nodding, wordless, too lost in her pleasure to answer. “Please,” she finally begs, and Stefan finally lets go, hiking her legs up to a slightly higher angle that drives both of them crazy before speeding up and watching as she falls apart underneath him, letting out a shout as she comes.

She’s loud in bed, wild and uninhibited. It’s just one more thing about her to love.

While Elena is still catching her breath, Stefan lays his head on her chest. One ear listening to her racing heartbeat, the other titled towards the ceiling, listening to the groans that Damon tries to muffle as he finds his own release. He presses a smile into her skin, watching as she gazes down at him. 

“Are you up for another round?” he asks, just to hear the curse that Damon lets loose.

She giggles, reaching up and running her fingers through her hair. It’s tangled after what they’ve just been up to, and it’ll be worse if they do it again, but he doesn’t think she minds. “I could be persuaded,” she whispers, leaning forward to kiss him.

He moves down her body to help her find her pleasure again, and he’s too focused on that to think much about the satisfaction that comes from the sound of the front door slamming shut.

When he looks up at the noise, Elena is blushing, and it occurs to him for the first time that she might have considered what the vampire super hearing means. That she might very well have known what she was doing. He kisses her hard, pressing her willing body down to the mattress as he slips his fingers inside her. She sighs into his mouth in satisfaction.

-x-

He does, at least, wait a little while. Long enough to where they’ve come to know Elena’s true parentage. Long enough for them to meet Isobel, long enough to where they realize that Katherine is back.

It is a long, strange time between the events, but eventually things cool down. They always do.

A few days have passed where minimal people have perished in what the news is claiming are animal attacks, and they’re just getting to spend the day together at the boarding house appreciating each other, passing the time until their next near-death experience. Werewolves are brand new and Stefan is already sick of them.

He makes sure that she’s in control before he tries it. She should be able to decide for herself how okay with this she is.

“Do you wish he was with you, instead?” he asks when she’s on top. His hands on her hips, careful (always careful, always so aware of just how human and mortal she is) to not put too much pressure.

When she freezes, he thinks that maybe he could have chosen a better time for this than in the middle of sex. A time when she might not feel so vulnerable, when she wouldn’t have been so (literally) exposed. At least Damon isn’t home to hear this.

“No,” she says, flinching as she forces the word out, and he wishes she wouldn’t just tell him what she thinks he wants to hear.

He strokes his thumbs along her hip bones, soothing and repetitive. “It’s okay. I want you to be honest with me.”

“I love you,” she tells him, and even though he doesn’t doubt her feelings for him, he’ll never tire of hearing that. “I’m happy with you; I won’t choose Damon.” Uncomfortable, she gets off of him, and he takes a moment to mourn the loss and learn from his mistake.

“I love you, too,” he says, automatically, thinking over the second part of what she’d said when he realizes that he made another mistake in addition to the setting of this conversation. He’d used the word ‘instead’ when he asked. As though she could only have one. As though she would have to choose between them.

They should have had this conversation sooner. And not in the middle of sex, but he’s realized that already. 

He watches her pull the sheet up, covering herself as she sits at the edge of the bed. She won’t meet his eyes, but he doesn’t know if it’s because she thinks he’ll be upset or if she’s truly uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes, moving next to her, resting a hand on her shoulder and feeling a brief spark of relief when she leans into his touch.

“Somehow I feel like I should be the one apologizing,” she mutters, giving him a rueful smile.

Because she thinks that he’s upset about the fact that she’s attracted to his brother. “No, I shouldn’t have… I love you, Elena,” he says, weighing the different options of how to continue. Whether he should just let it go and never broach the subject again after this spectacular failure. 

Leaning her head onto his shoulder, she waits for him to finish.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

“What I meant to ask is… Do you wish he were with you, too?” he asks finally, wondering what kind of unalterable change he has just brought to her attention. “With us.”

She looks at him, and he watches her eyes darken when she comes to understand his meaning before she freezes, pulling away. “I’m not Katherine,” she announces, and he’s really found almost every way of fucking this conversation up as possible.

Again, he takes a moment to be thankful that he’d at least had the presence of mind to not bring this up with Damon listening in. He doesn’t want to think about how horribly that scenario would have gone. No, better to control the variables one at a time, to be sure of what he has to work with before throwing them all together. He has to know that it will work before he lets himself try.

“I know you’re not Katherine,” he rushes to say, because she’s never going to be Katherine and he never wants her to be. “I’ve never thought that.” 

She pulls the sheet tighter around her body and stares at him blankly, defenseless. 

“I’m asking because I want you to be honest with me. I’m not going to be mad, no matter what.” He squeezes her shoulder and then declares, in a fit of bravery, “I’ve seen the way you look at him.”

“I love you,” Elena snaps, almost aggressively, and the idea of her getting aggressive with a vampire whose strength vastly outweighs her own is almost cute enough to distract him from the matter at hand. Almost.

Reaching out and taking her hands in his, he responds, “And I love you. We don’t have to talk about it right now, but I need you to know that I’m not angry with you. No matter your answer.” He hands her his shirt, and dips forward to kiss her, leaving the subject behind.

An hour later, Damon comes home and they all hang out in the kitchen while Elena eats dinner. Stefan drinks a cup of coffee and steals baby carrots off her plate because he likes the crunching noise they make. Damon bitches about everything, as per usual, and it’s a fairly normal end to the day at the Salvatore house. Elena still watches Damon out of the corner of her eyes, same as she did before, but now she doesn’t try to do it only when she thinks Stefan isn’t paying attention.

-x-

It’s no secret that Stefan hates dancing. He barely tolerated the activity while alive, and one of the benefits of being a supernatural creature with an infinite number of years ahead of him is that he’s too old to be peer pressured into doing things he doesn’t like.

He still ends up doing a lot of things he can’t find pleasure in, but all of them are motivated by his need to protect Elena. That will always be more than worth it.

Well, they’re either because he needs to protect her or because he just wants to make her happy. To get him to dance, all Elena has to do is tilt her head at him and ask nicely before he consents to twirling her around for a bit. She abuses this advantage, dragging him to every dance the school has (and why do they have so many?) and persuading him to practice the waltz that he learned as a child that she needed to do for the Miss Mystic Falls pageant (it counts even if he didn’t escort her that night), because it’s just his luck to fall in love with a girl who loves dancing.

Back when they were alive, Damon was always the one stealing dances from the town’s ladies. They were both proficient partners, but only Damon enjoyed the experience. He still does, spinning Elena around one night to 50s hits after Stefan has adamantly refused to sock hop or boogie woogie or whatever other ridiculous dances that came about during that time.

So Elvis’s _G.I. Blues_ is coming through the speakers, and Stefan is drinking the last of the bottle of scotch that Damon opened up earlier in the night. (He’s only had two glasses, whereas Damon came home from the Grill already buzzed and in the mood to keep it going.) For a moment, he remembers Elena’s outfit from the 50s dance, and wonders what it would have been like to meet her in another time.

Or another life. One where he wouldn’t have fangs and Elena wouldn’t know to be scared of things that go bump in the night. One where he and Damon wouldn’t have spent all those years hating each other.

His maudlin thoughts are cut off when Damon reaches his hand out expectantly, and Stefan glance twitches back and forth from the glass of scotch and his brother before he realizes it’s an invitation for Elena, who’s leaning against him on the couch.

Elena looks between the two of them, a little hesitant but mostly bemused, and Stefan says, “I’m never going to teach you how to jitterbug, so now’s your chance if you want it.”

She pouts at him playfully before grasping her hand in Damon’s and letting him help her up. They dance in front of the fireplace, his two favorite people, the only people he can imagine trusting with his life, and Damon’s hands sit lower on Elena’s hips than is strictly called for. Stefan wonders if more nights like these are in his future. If there’s a future to be had for them, if Klaus doesn’t find them, if they can kill him, if they can find a way to destroy any change of the curse being broken. He wants to feel confident, but he just doesn’t know how.

When the record finishes, Elvis’s soft crooning fading into the noise of the needle spinning, Damon pulls Elena back from going to sit on the couch again. “Not just yet,” he teases her, pausing by the bar to fill his glass again and subsequently drain it.

“Do you have more dances that Stefan won’t teach me?” she asks, going with him to their shelved record collection. She hasn’t let go of his hand since their last dance finished, and she keeps darting her eyes over to Stefan’s like she thinks he’s going to say something. Mischievous is a good look on her.

Digging through vinyl albums with one hand, Damon hums before pulling out something by The Temptations. “Oh, I have so much to teach you,” he announces. With a bit of fiddling, _G.I. Blues_ gets slid back into its spot on the shelf, and beach music starts drifting out of the speakers. He grins at her, drunken and wild, and announces with his voice pitched low, “For instance, I know for a fact that Stefan doesn’t know how to shag.”

Elena laughs so loudly that it’s almost a cackle, squeezing his hand as she does so. “Is that so?” she drawls, looking over to the couch where her boyfriend is rolling his eyes.

While he teaches her, Damon tells her about the years after World War 2 that he spent in the Carolinas, and Stefan listens with interest. They often don’t tell each other much about the times they’ve spent apart, and his brother is a good storyteller. He’s surely entertaining Elena, who lets him guide her through the dance with ease.

On a spin, when Elena catches his eye while Damon is distracted by pulling her back to him, she sends him a wink. Stefan waits until they repeat the move before lifting his glass at her and mouthing cheers.

-x-

Elena gets in the habit of studying at the boarding house, and Stefan grows used to see her perched on a couch with her textbooks and notes spread around her in a semicircle. She commandeers the coffee table, and Damon starts filling her in on things her textbooks don’t tell her about. It gets to the point where sometimes Stefan won’t even know it’s happening. He comes home from hunting in the forest to the sight of his girlfriend and brother side by side on the couch, Damon midway through some far-fetched tale about the sinking of the _USS Maine_.

“He wasn’t on board; don’t let him lie to you like that,” Stefan chides from the doorway.

“Stefan’s just bitter that he wasn’t at the front row for the event that caused the Spanish-American war. You have to remember I was a soldier,” Damon reminds them, an arm thrown over Elena’s shoulders that tightens as she laughs. 

Damon’s career as a soldier is something that Stefan sometimes has a hard time reconciling. Damon did fight in the Spanish-American war, as well as World War 1, and he even saw action in Korea and Vietnam. The only major war he hasn’t played a part in is World War 2, which he doesn’t know he’ll ever understand. There’s a sense of duty that his brother so clearly feels for his country.

Tucking a pen behind her ear, Elena just grins at the both of them before shooting Stefan a pointed look and rubbing her thumb on the corner of her mouth. Stefan glances to the hall mirror, briefly ashamed to see the streak of blood he’d missed before he wipes it away. “You weren’t on the _Maine_ ; you joined up later. You’re going to make her lose points on the essay.”

With a roll of his eyes, Damon kicks his feet onto the coffee table, carefully avoiding Elena’s open notebook. “Oh, losing points on a high school history essay. Clearly, that’s the worst thing that could happen. It’s not like we haven’t been fighting for our lives the past couple of weeks. Besides, like Alaric would give her anything less than an A.”

“That’s not the point–”

“Boys,” Elena says once, and she smiles when they acquiesce.

Stefan claims the couch across from them, and he watches with interest as Elena goes back to work. She kicks her feet up into Damon’s lap, and Damon rubs her ankle absentmindedly.

-x-

They get more daring. Of course they do, because Elena is a teenager, and Stefan has been one for well over a century. When it comes to things like this, they don’t know how to be careful about it. Because when there is enough time for them to be alone together, they’re often coming down an adrenaline high that doesn’t let Stefan think about being cautious any longer.

Only this time it’s Elena who throws caution to the wind, who licks down his shaft and swirls her tongue around the head before pulling off to ask, “Do you wish I was him?”

Above them, something falls to the ground on the first floor, not loud enough to where Elena would be able to hear it. Not loud enough to muffle the groan that Stefan can’t stop from escaping. Before he can answer (and how would he even begin to answer that question?), she dips back down and takes him in her mouth again, rendering him speechless once more.

It’s not the first time he’s thought of it. It is, however, the first time he thinks about it in bed with Elena. Closing his eyes and thinking of the dark hair as shortened, the hands resting on his hips strong enough to keep him pinned to the bed. “Oh, God,” he moans, helpless, hands flexing into the sheets.

She kisses her way up his stomach, giving in when he drags her up to kiss her, suddenly desperate with the urge. When they come apart, he sees her hand working between her legs and moves to replace it with his own, whispering, “Let me help you with that.”

“I want you,” she tells him, swaying in anticipation. He certainly doesn’t have any arguments there, watching as she lowers herself onto him.

When he’s fully seated inside her, Elena shifts her hips, looks at him like a challenge and says, “I wonder what he’d feel like. Inside me.” She doesn’t lower her voice.

Something different drops on the ground again from the first floor. Glass. It shatters. Stefan thinks of Damon’s favorite bourbon, the rocks glasses that are older than they are, and completely loses that train of thought when she starts to ride him with intent. 

He’s only a little surprised that Damon doesn’t appear in the doorway, crooked grin on his features, already unbuttoning his shirt as he says something like, “Why don’t you find out for yourself?”

The feeling of her around him and the thought in his mind is almost too much. His eyes roll up to the ceiling, and he forgets to be gentle with her for a brief second where his fingers press into her hips and she gasps.

Letting go, he thinks of apologizing (how could he forget? there are rules about falling in love with humans, and the first one is never forget what they are) until she cuts him off, leaning over to kiss him before the words can escape. She pulls moans and gasps out of him, and he’s too distracted to give any kind of coherent response.

By the time they’re done, Damon’s long since fled the house, and Elena doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed at the broken bottle of bourbon they find in the foyer. The alcohol is definitely going to stain the rug. Stefan can’t remember if that one qualifies as an antique or not, but either way he can’t find it in himself to care.

She cocks an eyebrow at the mess, unabashed and a little proud, and Stefan can’t help but press her into the wall and bite at her neck with blunt teeth.

-x-

This game they’ve been playing with each other, he and Elena, they haven’t written out rules for it. They take turns spontaneously, throwing caution constantly to the wind, and it doesn’t occur to him that there might be a downside, that someone might get hurt. Because how could they get hurt? It’s just the two of them, pushing and pulling at this newfound dynamic, discovering each other in the process.

At least, that’s how it appears to him. Elena reminds him that isn’t that case.

“I think we need to be more careful,” she tells him one night when they’re over her house. Stefan has choked down a dinner of roast chicken and steamed rice in an effort to maintain normalcy with Jenna, and they’ve gone up to Elena’s room to, apparently, discuss their next move.

He watches Elena at her dresser, pulling a brush through her shiny hair. She repeats the motion, again and again, until he knows that she must be doing it because the action brings her comfort and not because she needs to any longer. Her curious brown eyes look back at him through the mirror.

“You think anyone has noticed?” he asks. They haven’t been too brazen with their actions, even though they’re far more comfortable than they were at the beginning. 

She cocks an eyebrow. “I didn’t mean other people. I figured we’ll have time to worry about that later. No,” she says, and then she pauses. Her hand pauses as well, the brush hovering in midair before she places it back onto the dresser. “I think Damon is starting to notice.”

That catches him by surprise, and he props his head up on one of her pillows. “Isn’t that the point?” Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Last night, after making herself a sundae and convincing Damon to have a bite, Elena had wiped the whipped cream from Damon’s mouth with her thumb. Stefan was only surprised that she’d managed to restrain herself. He’d expected her to wipe it off with her own mouth. 

How long have they been playing at this? He and Damon, circling each other always, for the lifetimes behind them and those that are to come. Without something to temper them, they burn up too quickly, left to nurse their wounds alone. 

Katherine, if she hadn’t been such a horrendous bitch with a heart full of darkness and maggots, could have soothed that. Elena will be so much better for them. Stefan loves her more than he’d ever thought possible, continuously drawn to her goodness.

With a roll of her eyes, Elena spins on her stool to face him, her hair flinging out behind her. It smells of her lavender shampoo and the argon oil that she applies to the ends of it, the scent familiar and comforting. “He doesn’t know that we mean it. We’re serious about this, and maybe at first I thought it was just some weird joke that you were letting me in on, but… We’ve talked about it, but he doesn’t know that.” 

Only a few years ago, Stefan would have run. Even now, if he didn’t have Elena, he wouldn’t be ready for this kind of conversation. That’s the point of them being together, though. She makes him stronger, braver, willing to do anything. He’s still uncomfortable, but he powers through it.

Sitting up in the bed and moving over to make room for her to fit beside him, he tries to figure out where to begin. “Have we talked about it?” They’ve talked around it, certainly, but maybe they’ve never quite worked out the reality they’ve been grappling with. “Where would we even begin?”

She comes over and sits next to him, resting her hand on his knee. “I love you. Let’s start there.”

-x-

He meant what he said when he told Damon that history wouldn’t be repeating itself. How could it? They are changed from the men they used to be. They have lived through things they never could have dreamed of before, and this time they have Elena to help guide them through it.

Now that Elena has called his attention to it, he thinks he knows what she’s talking about. Damon’s personality is abrasive and charming in turns, using one of the other to cover up whatever genuine emotion he might be feeling. As he studies Damon’s interactions with the both of them, he watches how quickly he is to leave the room when they start to joke with him. Gone are the times when they all stay in the living room together, or even when Damon stays in the boarding house on a different floor once Elena and Stefan have come in.

He watches as his brother makes his exits with various excuses, some of them more plausible than others. Meeting Liz Forbes at the Grill, sure. Playing bridge with Carol Lockwood, whatever. But going to hang out with Matt Donovan? That’s where Stefan draws the line.

“Unless hang out is what the kids these days are calling hanging someone up with a noose, I really doubt that,” Stefan drawls, leaning against the kitchen counter and watching the kitchen door finish swinging shut. Damon is long gone already.

Elena peaks out at him from behind the refrigerator door. “I hate when you make old man jokes,” she pouts, pulling a bowl of strawberries out to snack on. Stefan doesn’t remember buying those; it must have been Damon’s doing.

“We’re going to have to corner him.” He doesn’t dignify what she said with a response. If she doesn’t want her boyfriend to make old man jokes, maybe she should find someone to date who wasn’t alive in the Civil War. His sense of humor just comes with the package, and she should know that by now. 

Besides, what’s the point of being more than a century old and stuck in the body of a seventeen-year-old if you can’t make kids these days jokes? She should just be glad he doesn’t shout things like “get off my lawn” at the hikers who occasionally find their way onto the back property.

She considers it, mulling the idea over before responding, “And just how am I supposed to be able to corner a vampire?”

She says it like she doesn’t know that Damon would do anything she asked. As though either of them would be able to deny her anything.

Rolling his eyes, Stefan dips forward to kiss her. “I said we. At this point, he’s not going to willingly sit there while we discuss the fact that we’ve been discussing it. But maybe it would be better for you to introduce the idea to him.” He pauses to consider it. With the way things had been going up until recently, he kind of thought the actual getting together was more of a forgone conclusion.

There is so much history between them that Damon would probably be more amenable to Elena to broach the topic than for Stefan to do it himself. With his luck, Damon might just snap his neck to end the conversation on a premature note. And then it would be another week before Stefan would be able to get over it.

“You just said he won’t be okay with a conversation, so you want me to do what here, exactly? Just ask him to come upstairs with us so we can jump his bones?” Elena asks, the skepticism clear in her tone.

Stefan gives it a moment to think it over. It sounds about as good of a plan as any.

“Boys,” Elena sneers, biting into another strawberry. It colors her lips a lovely red, the kind that would have distracted him even if his girlfriend hadn’t just brought up Damon coming to bed with him.

-x-

So they don’t go about it in the way that Elena said. She was able to talk enough sense into him that they didn’t bother with it. One plan cast aside, Elena takes it upon herself to start drafting up new ones.

“Okay, plan number fourteen: three’s company,” Elena introduces the idea, and Stefan looks up from his calculus notes to see what’s on the whiteboard.

After the first few plans and the subsequent edits they went under, Stefan decided they needed to invest in some hardware. It only took one Office Depot run to procure the board, an industrial sized box of sticky notes, and a set of colorful markers to draw the plans up with. Between this and playing hangman, they’ve gotten a fair bit of use out of everything. 

On the board is a diagram of The Grill and the town square. Studying it, he gives it a good look before turning to her with raised eyebrows. “You want us to bribe the manager of the grill into giving groups of three a discount?”

Elena shrugs. “You could just compel him,” she says, as though it isn’t an idea that she would have been morally horrified by before meeting him. “We just need a reason to get Damon to sit down with us.”

Stefan purses his lips and tries to figure out where the best place to begin would be. “We’re millionaires.”

“So bribe him, whatever.” She grabs a purple marker and jots ‘bribe’ next to The Grill, as though that’s the only thing they’d need to correct with it.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he says, “We don’t need a discount. And Damon never pays at The Grill anyway, he just compels the waitstaff and I just pay them a few hundred at the end of the month when I balance the checkbook.” The idea of Damon being motivated by anything so mundane as a discount is laughable.

When he opens his eyes, Elena is staring at him oddly. “You balance a checkbook? That’s so old fashioned.”

-x-

In the end, they don’t use any of the (thirty eight) plans that Elena comes up with. Instead, Damon wanders up to Stefan’s room one day (they’re both working on homework for once, otherwise Stefan thinks he’d have kept to his routine and stayed far away) and sees the whiteboard propped up in the corner.

“What’s this?” he asks before he can help himself, and Stefan goes to stop him when Elena sticks out her leg just in time to send him sprawling across the floor.

“Jesus Christ,” Stefan hisses, crawling over to the dresser to lean against it. When he goes to glare at Elena, her attention is otherwise occupied by where Damon is starting to pull the board out from where they’ve put their backpacks in front of it.

This time, the board proud displays plan #39 – only worked up halfway, but there’s enough on there for Damon to get the gist of it. 

The title, scrawled across the top in Elena’s handwriting, reads clearly: Throuple of Freaks in Love.

Stefan has the presence of mind to be grateful that Damon hadn’t walked in two days earlier. Plan #38 was (mostly) a joke and was called Salvatore Stallions. It consisted, somehow, of them dressing in nineteenth century fashion and getting horses for the stable. And a stableboy, eventually, but they’d scrapped it before it had come that far once Elena realized she’d need horseback riding lessons.

Plan #35 was called Practicing Polygamy. Elena had drawn up a bar graph of their various levels of happiness in coupled formations and as individuals. Together, it was clear, they faired better. “See,” she’d told him, as though this all had been her idea, “it’s scientifically impossible for this to be a bad decision.”

Plan #22, titled Stud Muffins, included an illustration of a muffin to really drive the point home.

On the whole, maybe plan #39 isn’t the worst one for Damon to walk in on.

Clutching his ankle as it throbs in pain, Stefan wonders if they’ve gotten their hopes up. If maybe they’ve been reading this all wrong.

“Are you serious?” Damon asks, and there’s no inflection in his voice.

They had talked about this, and Elena had reminded him that Damon plays everything so close to check because he’s terrified of being hurt. Stefan wonders when she started understanding his own brother better than he does.

Elena touches Damon’s shoulder from where she’s walked up behind him, and he looks surprised, as though he doesn’t have supernatural hearing. “Very serious. We’ve thought a lot about this.” She points as the 39 that’s in the corner of the board, as though to prove just how many times they’ve considered it. “I’m sorry if we ever made it seem like a joke to you.”

Surprise flickers across Damon’s face before he manages to mask it. “And you, both of you,” he clarifies, glancing at Stefan before looking back at her, “want this. As in, three of us.”

“Are we going to have to draft a fortieth plan to convince you?” Stefan asks, pulling himself up with the dresser. He sits down on the bed and reaches out, smiling when Elena slips her hand into his without hesitating. “Yes, Damon. We’re serious.”

His brother looks between them again, expression shifting into something cautious that Stefan can’t identify. He freezes when Elena tips forward to press her lips to his, hand still joined to Stefan’s. 

“Is this okay?” she asks, suddenly unsure.

Stefan is torn between wanting to comfort each of them, the moment frozen in time. 

Damon surges forward suddenly, wrapping one arm around Elena’s waist and slipping his other hand into her hair. Stefan watches them, how perfect they look together, half of what he’s been waiting all of these lifetimes for. Damon is all sharp edges, but Elena soothes him somehow, lessens the urgency that he seems to always feel. 

By the time they draw back from each other, Elena is the one who lingers, wrapping one hand around his wrist to keep him from going too far. They hover together, breathing the same air, truly breaking apart only when Stefan interrupts them, saying, “Injured party over here.”

“I think you should have to work for it,” Damon suggests, but even so, he sits down on the bed next to Stefan, Elena in front of them. “So this is what you were playing at the whole time, huh, brother? And here I thought it was a sick sort of joke.”

And Stefan guesses that it is a sick sort of joke, that a hundred and fifty years later they’re here with Katherine’s doppelgänger, and that they need someone else to help them fit together, but Stefan isn’t really interested in the details of how eventualities come about. What matters is that they’ve found their way back to each other. Perhaps nothing else is quite as important as that. To answer, he takes a page from Elena’s book and dips forward to kiss Damon, although he’s not nearly as gentle about it as he was.

To his credit, neither is Damon. 

When they break apart, Stefan thinks that they’ve waited a century and a half to get here. When Damon dives back in, it catches him off guard, and it would have knocked him off balance if Elena wasn’t there to steady him. She was worth the wait, he thinks, and lets himself be devoured.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be honest, I'm not wild about how I ended it but I also knew if I waited to be satisfied with it, I'd just keep editing and eventually forget about it and never post anything. So, here you go.


End file.
